My wife is running Kubuntu 8.04, and when she first logs in, she can listen to pandora radio just fine, but then if someone logs into pidgin, pandora will never work again until the xserver is restarted--I haven't found any other way to get it working again and it embarasses me because she makes fun of my weird computer operating system.
I never have noticed this problem on my user account because I like my computers like my women; I only want them to make sounds when I ask them to. But she would like pandora to not mysteriously quit working. The computer's only sound connection is SPDIF and alsamixer says it stays on, it must be that something is stealing it instead of mixing the sounds together.